Age in Love

by Jacqueline Vanhoutte

  The image of Viola and Sebastian as a cleft apple recalls the moment Zeus splits his “round” creatures like a “sorb apple” or an “egg.” New creatures forged out of an original “man-woman,” the twins are distinguishable by the “little thing” that Viola lacks “of a man” (3.4.303), an anatomical area to which Twelfth Night; or What You Will returns obsessively.

  That Twelfth Night’s “master’s mistress” (5.1.326) is half of a formerly round whole makes her creator an analogue of Plato’s Zeus, whose strained relationship to his creations becomes an allegory of authorial regret. Zeus charges Apollo—the god Shakespeare elsewhere associates with keeping his own poetic “invention” from becoming “deformed”—with refashioning his original work.34 After the originary moment, in other words, creation becomes a form of re-creation or revision. As if to emphasize such aesthetic applications, Plato assigns his myth to Aristophanes, the playwright renowned for cutting personal satire and revered by Jonson for the “dignity of his spirit and judgement” (Every Man Out, induction, 245). Shakespeare often likens his artistry to the forces that produce life; in Sonnet 20, which relies on the same creation myth, the poet and Nature parallel one another in the creation of a “master mistress” (1–2). Where Nature produces the original by adding (“one thing to my purpose nothing,” 20.12), the poet produces his version by subtracting (“a woman’s face, but not acquainted,” 20.3). The same judicious redaction shapes Twelfth Night’s characters, defined more by what they lack than what they have. Contra Jonson, Shakespeare insists that his “creatures,” apparent borrowings from Plautus’s Menaechme, result from artistic processes described by Aristophanes.

  Insofar as these processes include the cutting and remastering of the Falstaff materials, Shakespeare also, and perhaps ironically, expresses discomfort with the strain of dramaturgy that produced his “whoreson round man” and inspired Jonson’s comical satires. Twelfth Night pushes against the conventions of satire, which depends on stable demarcations, by giving us a surfeit or excess of these licentious old men. “Increased in number,” the characters deriving from Falstaff are also “diminished in strength,” like Apollo’s redacted creatures. While several critics identify Sir Toby Belch as a version of Falstaff, for example, they “all agree” that “Sir Toby lacks Falstaff’s imaginative brilliance.”35 An old knight much given to “quaffing and drinking,” who cannot “confine” himself to “the modest limits of order” (1.3.9–14), Toby inherits Falstaff’s carnivalesque elements. Jensen suggests that Shakespeare may have derived the idea of splitting Falstaff from The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), which features “two new Sir Johns with very different devotional identifications.” Interested in confessional conflicts over festivity, she takes Sir Toby, Malvolio, and Feste to be the relevant fragments.36 But other characters, including Malvolio and Orsino, qualify as well. Introducing a signature note of escalation, Shakespeare offers us five or six versions of his old knight, with the meager miles gloriosus Sir Andrew Aguecheek serving as a surplus shard. That cowardly “carpet” knight (3.4.236) receives the unkindest cut of all—the anti-Leicestrian material on erectile dysfunction. An ambulatory castration joke, Sir Andrew has hair that “hangs like flax on a distaff” so that “a huswife” could take him “between her legs and spin it off” (1.3.102–4). Yet another old man reduced to a “feminine suppository,” he illustrates Shakespeare’s strategy of “spending again what is already spent” (Sonnets, 76.13) in Twelfth Night.37

  Following theatrical precedent, Shakespeare places a “fair princess” at the center of an erotic meritocracy.38 Olivia is the stationary planet around which the cleft characters orbit, the round “O” or “nought” (1.1.11) targeted by their various wills. Cesario, Sebastian, Orsino, Malvolio, and Sir Andrew all pursue this “cruell’st she alive,” who seems determined to lead her “graces to the grave, / And leave the world no copy” (1.5.241–43). Their language about their “marble-breasted tyrant” (5.1.124) hearkens back to an earlier era, when the queen’s marriage was the most pressing issue confronting the English political nation. Orsino imagines that Olivia’s “sweet perfections” can only be fitted “with one self king” (1.1.38), for example, and Cesario thinks that Olivia’s refusal to give herself in marriage means that she does “usurp” herself, for “what is [hers] to bestow is not [hers] to reserve” (1.5.188–89). Stephen Greenblatt remarks that only Elizabeth I “provided a model” for a “career” like Olivia’s. Shakespeare fosters the parallel at every turn, making Orsino address Olivia in the court’s Petrarchan discourses, figuring Viola/Cesario as “a rare courtier” (3.1.86) and as “Orsino’s embassy” (1.5.166), and having Olivia distribute rings and miniatures, “favors” commonly awarded by Elizabeth I.39 Provided with an “allow’d fool” (1.5.94) who recalls Richard Tarleton, Olivia takes fierce exception to the mistreatment of her favorites, as Elizabeth did (echoeing Markham, Feste warns Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian that he “would not be in some of your coats for twopence” [4.1.30–31]). Olivia conducts herself as a queen might, moreover, advertising her powers of life and death over her household and relying on the royal “we” when negotiating with other characters.40 These reimagine Olivia, the “daughter of a count” (1.2.36), as a regal figure, whose tyrannical decision to abjure “the company / and sight of men” (1.2.40–41) has plunged Illyria into a paralytic state of deferred desire.41 Viola’s surmise that Sebastian must be in “Elizium” (as the 1623 Folio spells it, 1.2.4) confounds Illyria not just with the happy fields of Greek mythological lore but also with England, the land of Eliza. Like many things in this retrospective play, the pun is an old one, dating to George Peele’s Arraygnment of Paris (1584), and refurbished by Jonson in Every Man Out of His Humour (2.1.22).42

  The parallel between Olivia and Elizabeth may not be an “exact one,” as Carole Levin observes, but it is an evocative one, which sets the tone for the play as a whole and shades all relations within it.43 Orsino announces his intention to emulate Endymion by reclining on “sweet beds of flow’rs” (1.1.39) in the play’s first scene. When he compares his love to the sea, he channels Ralegh’s Ocean, in helpless thrall to a chaste moon. Orsino’s “high fantastical” constructions introduce Olivia as a type of Cynthia or Diana, with some notable consequences for himself:

  O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,

  Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!

  That instant was I turn’d into a hart,

  And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

  E’er since pursue me. (1.1.15, 18–22)

  In a few brief lines Orsino assigns himself the roles of Actaeon and of Endymion, the classical figures closely identified in the period with the perils and pleasures of royal favoritism.44 To cite the most pertinent example, Jonson had combined these myths to target courtiers seeking to become “eternally engallanted” in The Fountaine of Selfe-Love or Cynthia’s Revels (4.3.3). A parody of Endymion, this play satirizes a whole host of behaviors associated with court favoritism, including the “painting, slicking, glazing, and renewing old rivelled faces” (Palinodia 21), and the staging of “scene[s] of courtship” with recycled “play-particles” (3.4.40, 3.5.96). Jonson illustrates the reciprocal relationship between court and theater when he borrows the “play-particle” Philautia or Self-Love from a disastrous 1595 Accession Day entertainment that Francis Bacon wrote at the Earl of Essex’s behest. According to the political wisdom of the time, “self love” was a “false believe” avoided by good “Counslers.”45 Although the earl had meant to persuade Elizabeth I that he loved her more than himself in the Accession Day entertainment, she came away unconvinced.46 Like Essex or Leicester, also allegedly given over to “selfe love of him selfe,” Jonson’s courtiers drink from the Fountain of Self-Love, where “young Actaeon fell, pursued and torn / By Cynthia’s wrath, more eager than his hounds” (1.2.82–83).47 When Shakespeare recycles Jonson’s lines at the beginning of Twelfth Night, he avails himself of the same technique to place Orsino�
�s courtship of Olivia in comparative relation to “scene[s] of courtship” from the past. These include his own, since Merry Wives had also fused the Actaeon and Endymion myths to show the horned Falstaff, whose lusty “flames aspire” too high, “wink[ing]” and “couch[ing]” on stage before his Fairy Queen (5.5.97–98, 48), in imitation of the moon’s lovers. Orsino’s opening performance comprises the same elements as Falstaff’s concluding turn, even if this noble “hart” appears far more decorous than that “brib’d buck” (Merry Wives, 5.5.24).

  Olivia casts such a powerful spell that all her suitors conjure past performances in this manner. The enthralled Sebastian agrees to be ruled moments after they meet; he too hopes to perform an elegant version of the lapse into bestiality by letting “fancy still [his] sense in Lethe steep / If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!” (4.1.60–63). Like Circe’s island, which according to Boym signifies the paradoxical pleasures of nostalgic longing, “the seduction of non-return home,” Illyria is “an ultimate utopia of regressive pleasure and divine bestiality,” an “Elyzium” constituted of the “reliques” and “memorials” (3.3.18–23) of an earlier time.48 When the captain claims that Sebastian stood “like Arion on the dolphin’s back” (1.2.15) in emulation of the “Arion . . . ryding aloft upon his old friend the Dolphin” at Kenilworth, he identifies Illyria more with the rarefied world of the old Elizabethan court entertainments.49 In this fantastical world—the world of Leicester’s Kenilworth, of Peele’s Arraygment, of Lyly’s Endymion, of Ralegh’s poetry—time is held in suspense, while mature men abandon themselves to the adoration of a queen whose “summer ever lastethe.”50 Like the courtiers described by Cardinal Allen, who committed to the “single lyfe to the danger of their soules, and decay of their families, to attend [Elizabeth I’s] pleasure,” Olivia’s suitors appear destined to forgo marriage and the begetting of lawful children.51 Into this somnolent state of affairs, the young twins arrive like time-keepers, ominous reminders that the older characters are wasting “the treasure of [their] time” (2.5.77).

  By drawing on the competing languages of nostalgia and satire, Twelfth Night stages rival evaluations of its central characters, putting into conflict the discourses of praise and blame that shaped Elizabethan conversations about “what great ones do.” Elizabeth’s admirers lauded her management of “houshold affaires,” for example, noting she “kept the like equall hands balancing the sloth or sumptuousnesse of her great Stewards, and white staves, with the providence, and reservednesse of a Lord Treasurer.”52 In much the same way, Shakespeare invites us to admire Olivia’s ability to “sway her house, command her followers, / Take and give back affairs, and their dispatch, / With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing” (4.3.16–20). But he also puts this regal woman in humiliatingly compromising positions. The business with Malvolio enacts a grotesque parody of the Actaeon myth.53 Claiming unauthorized knowledge of Olivia’s “c’s, her u’s, and her t’s” (2.5.88), Malvolio wants to trade “services” with his mistress, hoping thereby to become “Count Malvolio” (2.5.158, 35). As Dympna Callaghan points out, the numerous puns on “Count” and “cunt” and “cut” help put Olivia’s “private parts . . . on display for everyone’s amusement.”54 Orsino (an actual count) and Sebastian (a future count, since the play endows Olivia with the power to encount her husband) participate in this public exposure, even if they claim no special knowledge of Olivia’s “great Ps” (2.5.87). For all her “smooth, discreet, and stable bearing” poor Olivia fares at times little better than Sir Andrew’s huswife, Falstaff’s Mistress Quickly, or the “naked feind in the forme of a lady” who exposes “her bettelbroude urchin” to Leicester’s “gase of . . . retoricke speculation” in News.55

  Indeed, the “sport royal” (2.3.173) of Twelfth Night borrows broadly from satiric representations of “Cynthia’s sports” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.6.37). “Swagger[ing] it in black and yellow” and kissing “away [his] hand in kindness” (Cynthia’s Revels, 3.5.99, 3.4.41), Malvolio epitomizes the Jonsonian courtier “sick of self-love” who tastes “with a distemp’red appetite” (Twelfth Night, 1.5.90–91).56 When one of Jonson’s courtiers seeks preferment with the ladies by “dancing” (Cynthia’s Revels, 4.5.48), he chooses men like Ralegh or Christopher Hatton as aspirational models, taking the malicious gossip about their theatricality seriously.57 Likewise, Malvolio feels that he need only deliver the right performance, aimed at satisfying his lady’s eccentric erotic tastes, to become a “made” man (2.5.155). Numerous in-jokes confirm Malvolio’s status as a vehicle for such “pastime” (3.4.138) by encouraging audiences to remember past times. Disguised as the provocatively named Sir Topas, Feste serenades Malvolio with “Hey, Robin, jolly Robin, / Tell me how thy lady does” (4.2.72–73), an old song about a provocatively named courtier’s currying favor with a lady.58 Topas’s questions about “th’opinion of Pythagoras” (4.2.57) point back, meanwhile, through Cynthia’s Revels (4.3.110–18) to Endymion, where Cynthia mocks “the ridiculous opinions” that Pythagoras holds (4.3.46–47). Of course, the idea that a man’s soul might inhabit an animal’s body is relevant to those undergoing “suche a metamorphosis” at a lady’s hand “as poetes do seyn was made of the companyons of Ulisses.”59 Predictably enough, Malvolio follows Sir Tophas, Bottom, and Falstaff in being made an “ass” (2.3.168).60

  Designed to provoke the “scornful” laughter that Sir Philip Sidney says we reserve for “deformed creatures,” Malvolio is “ridiculous” (3.4.38) in part because he deviates from age-related ideals of comportment.61 Sir Toby first directs our attention to Malvolio’s age when he sings “There dwelt a man in Babylon” (2.3.78–79), an old ballad about the “filthy lust” of the town “Elders” for the chaste Susanna.62 Shakespeare resorts to the disciplinary discourses that policed male sexuality to shape audience reactions to Malvolio throughout the play. Where Sebastian is in the bloom of what Cicero calls “unadvised adolescencye,” when men are subject to “the fervent heate” of sexual passion, Malvolio occupies the position of an advisor who has “lead his prince to virtue by his worth and authority,” a role that requires being “old (because knowledge rarely comes before a certain age).”63 Olivia relies on her steward’s counsel, valuing him for his age-appropriate “sad and civil” (3.4.5) affect. Unfortunately, Malvolio himself fails to appreciate that “love is not a good thing in old men, and those things which in young men are the delights, courtesies, and elegances so pleasing to women, in old men amount to madness and ridiculous ineptitude, and whoever indulges in them will cause some women to despise him and others to deride him.”64 Behind on his reading of “politic authors” (2.5.161), Olivia’s steward ignores learned advice on aging, lapses into “midsummer madness” (3.4.56), and becomes “a common recreation” (2.3.135) to all.

  Like the costume change that marks Bottom’s translation, Malvolio’s cross-gartered stockings signal his conclusive transformation into an ass. That the steward finds his new outfit challenging to wear—“this does make some obstruction in the blood, this cross-gartering” (3.4.20–21), he fusses—indicates a bad fit not between costume and class, as is often thought, but between costume and bodily composition.65 Doctors, who believed that “obstruction” resulted from the cooling effects of aging, advised “olde men” to “beware” of making “obstructions,” which “with clammy matter stoppe the places where the natural humours are wrought and digested.”66 While a youth like Sebastian might wear tight garments without injury to his health, this was not the case for older men. Judging by Sir Toby’s reference to “Peg a Ramsey,” another old ballad, about a married man who yearns for the yellow stockings he wore in his bachelorhood, Malvolio compounds the problem by wearing clothes that had been fashionable in his youth. Not only is he too old for his clothes, but these are also old-fashioned.67

  The ladies’ horrified reaction to Malvolio’s turn as a youthful gallant confirms that the “delights” which are “pleasing to women” in “young men” appear as “madness” in older ones
. Maria, “a beagle, true bred” (2.3.179) complains that the steward “does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies; you have not seen such a thing as ‘tis.” She can “hardly forbear hurling things” at Malvolio, and she feels confident that Olivia “will strike him” (3.2.75–82), as indeed Olivia does in some productions. Taking their cue from the fairies in Endymion and Merry Wives, Maria and her accomplices bind Malvolio up—possibly to a stake or pillar—so as to “fool him black and blue” (2.5.10).68 Malvolio thus endures what amounts to a “bear-baiting” (2.5.8) for his violations of generational decorum. Fabian claims that if the gulling of Malvolio “were play’d upon a stage now, I would condemn it as an improbable fiction” (3.4.127–28). The metatheatrical joke is all the more delicious for the fact that these “play-particles” had been played on all manner of public stages before. Shakespeare insists on the familiarity of this satiric pattern, reproduced here for “our pleasure and [Malvolio’s] penance” (3.4.137–38).

  As an aging steward pursued by dogs for violating his “due tyme and season,” Malvolio would have raised familiar historical ghosts as well as theatrical ones.69 The staff of office that he brandishes (5.1.284), like the steward’s chain that he fingers, evoke not just actual bears, but also Elizabeth’s former Lord Steward, the Earl of Leicester, whose staff had become a lightning rod for age-related ridicule.70 Like that allegedly hypocritical nobleman, Shakespeare’s “kind of Puritan” (2.3.140) dreams about marrying his noble mistress, wishing to cast “nets and chains and invisible bands about that person whom most of all he pretendeth to serve.”71 Olivia’s steward looks to “the Lady of the Strachy” who married “the yeoman of the wardrobe” (2.5.39–40) for a historical precedent. Although they do not always know what to make of this glancing allusion, or numerous others like it, even modern critics feel prompted by it to consider real life models for Malvolio.72 Original audiences might have recalled another “example” of a “time-pleaser” or “affection’d ass, that cons state without book . . . the best persuaded of himself, so cramm’d (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all look on him love him” (2.3.147–52). Like the “great Beare” who schemed to obtain a crown he could not claim by “right, title” or “descent of blood,” Malvolio imagines himself a prince. He fantasizes about “sitting in his state” and, Leslie Hotson points out, “a state is no count’s chair, but a canopied royal throne.”73 Here, then, is Shakespeare’s most explicit rendering of the familiar scenario by which an aging favorite who is not born great attempts an erotically appealing performance to “achieve greatness” or “have greatness thrust upon ’em” (2.5.145–46).